10 ways to make Windows 10 and 11 faster. Most of them are free. Hi, everyone.
Leo, Notenboom, here for Askleo.com
We've all been there. You've got your machine, you've been using it for a while, and it
just seems to be slow for some reason. What I've got here are 10 things you can
do to hopefully speed up your machine. Obviously, if you've done some of them
already, they may or may not help. But I think some of them are things
that are worth doing and are worth doing every so often because, well,
things happen over time. Our first one is simply
too much running software. And I mean that very specifically
for applications that you install that themselves install something that
starts every time you fire up Windows. Not only does that slow down the startup
process, but by leaving that software running all the time,
it can impact performance throughout. Here's what we do. We'll head over to Windows 11, right-click on the toolbar,
an empty area there we'll do, hit task manager, and in task manager,
look for startup apps. Now, I'm using Windows
11 for these examples. Everything I'm talking about applies to Windows 10, it just may show
up in some different areas. Usually very similar or very close
to what I'm showing you here. So in this particular case, I have several different things
that start up automatically. The first thing I'm going to do is click on the Status column to sort
by who's enabled and who's not. You can see I've already been through this process with this machine because I
have several different things disabled. Defender doesn't need to start up. Microsoft to do doesn't need to start up. Phone link, I never use it. Power Automate desktop,
I'm not even sure what it is. Terminal does not need
to start up automatically. Xbox, I never use Xbox
applications on my PCs. You get the idea. Now, your list will be
different than mine. Absolutely. But this is a place to look to see what's
starting every time you fire up Windows. In this case, I noticed
that Teams is running. I never use Teams. So right-click on it and click on Disable. Now, the next time I reboot this machine,
Teams will not start up and Teams will not be running
the entire time I use my computer. Number two, malware. Obviously, we want to avoid it wherever possible, but sometimes malware can
make its way onto your machine. And sometimes, the only way you might even realize that it's there is
that it's slowing you down. Malware these days really
tries hard to hide. And by hiding, it really means that it's trying to not show any visible
indication that it exists. However, sometimes the malware is working, and that working can manifest
as slowdowns. So what I want you to do
is run a full scan. In this case,
I'm going to fire up Windows Defender or Microsoft security, depending
on what it's called this week. Go to virus and threat protection, hit scan options because we do
not want to run a quick scan. I want to run a full scan,
and then we'll just click scan now. Now, this may take a little while on your
machine, but the point here is that you're scanning
your entire hard disk for threats. The quick scan scans the most common areas, the most common
places where malware shows up. But if you're going to intentionally run
a scan for some reason, I do recommend that you run a full scan,
if at all possible. Now, while we're on the topic of malware,
number three is your anti-malware tool. Well, it's going to start up when you sign
in, and it does take some effort, some CPU cycles, some whatever,
while it does its initial scans in. Honestly, this is not something
I want you to play with. This is not something I want you to change because that initial scan,
when Windows starts up, is important. The one way to potentially work around this, and this also is a much larger issue
that depends exactly on how you use your computer, is to leave your
computer on 24 hours a day. That way, the malware scan that it's
trying to do every day when you sign in will probably run overnight instead
while you're not using the machine. That is essentially what I
do with all of my machines. I have a different article on whether or
not you should leave your machine turned on or off overnight, and this
feeds into that discussion. While we carry on, I'm going to let
this scan continue in the background. Now, number four is Windows Search. Windows Search is a background
service that can be turned off. It is a service that basically creates and maintains that index that the
actual search function can use. To turn it off, we're going to right-click on the Start button,
click on Computer Management. In Computer Management,
we'll click on services and applications. We're going to click on this little
greater than sign here to expand things. Click on services. Now, you can see we've got a nice long list of services
sorted alphabetically by name, which means that we will go all the way
to the bottom and find windows search. Right-click on it and click on properties. We're going to do two
things in properties. One is we're going to stop the service,
just turn it off right now. But the other thing we're going to do is change the startup type
to disabled after we hit OK. Now, when we reboot this machine, the search indexing service will not
start, and therefore it won't slow down your machine while it's
creating or updating the search index. Your search will still work. Search is designed to work
with or without the index. It's just going to take a little bit
longer if you don't have an index. Perfect for if you use the Windows Search to search for things on your machine
infrequently or perhaps not at all. Number five,
visual settings or visual effects. Let's quickly have a look here in
settings, and I'm going to search for visual,
and there you'll see visual effects. There are several effects here that may or may not impact performance
on your machine. Animation effects are the things where
things basically when you open a window, it basically gets bigger on the machine
magically or other kinds of things. And the transparency effects
are exactly what you think. Some of these windows have portions that are semi-transparent,
so you can see what's behind them. The issue is that with some, not all,
but some graphics, cards, especially low end ones or older ones,
this functionality can actually make them work harder or make your CPU work harder,
potentially slowing down your machine. If you're at all concerned about that, or if you just don't care that these
things happen at all, turn them off. That way, they won't. Number six, power mode. Now, this is one that mostly applies to laptops, but it's actually
present in most desktop PCs as well. What we're going to do is search for power mode, optimize your device based
on power, use, and performance. Right here, we have power mode. You can see that on this machine,
it's set to balanced. I believe this is probably
the default setting for most new PCs. For a laptop, you're going to want
to make a judgment call here. What's more important? Your battery life or your CPU performance
or your computer's performance. If, like me, your laptop is mostly plugged in or the battery is really healthy,
certainly long enough for whatever it is you take the laptop with you for,
then change balance to best performance. That way, the CPU will run at max speed
more often, and a few other tweaks will be made so that the system runs
as quickly as possible. Like I said, on laptops,
this is often set to balanced. Sometimes it'll be set
to best battery life. On desktops, honestly,
there really isn't a reason not to set it to best performance
to therefore speed up your machine. Number seven. Number seven is okay, I'll just call it a little judgy
on my part, and that is simply this. And I see this often. You're trying to do too much. It's not uncommon at all for me to run
across people's machines where they have multiple applications over,
dozens of tabs open in their browser. They've got Word running, they've got Excel running,
they've got other programs running. Many more programs, well, to be honest,
than they need at that point in time. And if they do enough of them, then depending on the system
characteristics, how much RAM or disk or CPU or whatever that specific machine has,
that can dramatically impact performance. So to speed up,
try and do one thing at a time. Or as few of things at a time as is necessary to do whatever task
you're attempting to accomplish. When you're done, close the application. When you're done, close the browser tabs. That way,
all of these applications won't be competing for the limited
resources on your machine. Again, speed up your machine by trying
to focus on doing one thing at a time. Number eight,
this one is a little bit harder to quantify and to solve
it isn't necessarily free. Very often, what we think of as speed of our machine is in reality the
speed of our internet connection. For example, if I bring up Com, there was a delay there. That's not the fault of this computer. That's a function of both the speed
of my internet connection and, quite honestly, the speed
of the Ask Leo server. There's a little bit of a delay there. You can't speed that up by necessarily
doing anything specific to your machine. This is a case where you either learn
to live with the speed of your internet or
you spend a little bit of money and pay your internet service provider
for a faster connection. Obviously, since this is my business,
that's what I've done. But it may not be
the solution for everybody. This really does impact the kinds of things you're doing if
you're doing things online. If you spend your life in your browser, if you read all of your email in your
browser, if you're doing all sorts of online shopping,
if you're doing whatever, if what you're doing is 90% in your web
browser, then the speed you are likely experiencing is the speed
of your internet connection. And you can speed up that whole scenario
by getting a faster internet connection. Number nine, insufficient RAM. So I've talked about RAM several times,
and this issue is that Windows loves RAM. More importantly, it really dislikes
not having enough RAM. It will try to soldier on. This goes back to running all these
different programs at the same time. One of the big impacts is
that they all end up using RAM. If you don't have enough to service the needs of all those programs you're
trying to run, then Windows is going to try, but it's going to use the disk as
virtual memory, and that will be slower and will dramatically impact the overall
performance of your machine. I've already said try and do less,
but the other side of that coin is to try potentially adding more RAM to your
system if it will accept more RAM. Now, you can see here on this machine,
I have four gigabytes of available RAM. Quite honestly, these days,
that's probably on the low end. I certainly wouldn't really want to run Windows 10 or 11 with less than
four gigabytes these days. On the other hand, there are certainly
machines that can accept a lot more. How much more your machine can accept
depends on your specific machine. Newer ones can probably handle
more than they come with. Older ones may be maxed out by now. The only way to find out is to explore. But if you have the opportunity, honestly,
right now, RAM is not horribly expensive, and it can be a relatively fast
improvement for your system. In that same vein, one of the fastest ways
to get more speed out of your system, unfortunately, it's probably the most
expensive option that I'm going to talk about so far, is to replace your old
spinning platter hard disk with an SSD. Older hard disks, the old magnetic spinning platter style,
they are simply slower than SSDs. Ssds stand for solid state drive. That means they have no moving parts. It's all electronics,
and it's all much faster. Prices have absolutely come down of late
and they are absolutely cost effective. They will not get you as many terabytes per dollar as a spinning
platter hard drive. But honestly, for most machines, one terabyte of SSD is
plenty for a working system. So if you have the budget, if you can do it,
one of the most effective ways to speed up your machine is to replace
your hard disk with an SSD. Now, 11. Yes, I said they'd be 10. I actually have more than 10. One of the things that can impact your performance is I'll call it software rot
or Windows crust or Windows Compromise. I'm going to point you at a different article and video,
Five Steps to Repair Windows 10 Without Losing Programs,
because those steps, which involve running the system file checker to DISM to doing
repair installs on Windows, they can have an appreciable impact
on the resulting speed of your system, and they're absolutely worth considering
if you find yourself in this situation. There's an obscure setting in many video adapters, mostly older video
adapters, called color depth. In other words, does each pixel on your screen require
eight bits, 16 bits, 24 bits, or 32 bits? Again, especially for the older displays, older video cards, having fewer bits per
pixel can actually speed up the amount of time that Windows takes
to display things on your screen. With more modern or current display
adapters, not really as big of an issue. Also, in the case of older hardware,
if you're still still running a regular old magnetic platter spinning hard drive,
defrag it. I don't know which version of Windows you're running, and of course,
if you're running Windows Seven or better, Windows is probably already
defragging it for you once a week. However, it's certainly worth checking. If the drive is fragmented heavily for any reason, that can also sometimes
dramatically impact your performance. This does not apply to SSDs. And again, in the hardware scheme
of things, especially for older machines, it's possible that you just may have
a slow machine, a slow CPU, and there's not really a lot
more you can do about that. It's very rare for you to be able to simply replace the CPU chip on your
Motherboard for something faster. It usually requires a complete change
of the Motherboard, which honestly is most cost-effectively done by just
getting a new machine. Unfortunately, there's no
real rule of thumb here. If your machine is older, you've had it for maybe five or 10 years,
it's worth considering. Most machines right now are coming at pretty peppy CPU speeds, but it is
something to at least be aware of. And typically, it's one of those things you'll resolve next time
you get a new machine. And finally, it's funny. Honestly, this probably should be item
number zero before everything else, but I'm going to throw it here at the end
because I'm sure you've already done this. But in case you haven't,
reboot your machine. I know it sounds silly, it sounds obvious. It's like I said, the first response
we have to so many different problems. But I think you'd be surprised at how
many people just never get around to it. They're running their machine, maybe they're running it 24/7,
and they reboot maybe once a month. Great that the system is staying up
that long, but if it does, it is very possible the system is
still getting slower over time. Time.
My recommendation, reboot once a day. In my case, the machine I'm using right now, my desktop machine,
since I run a nightly script to do a few things anyway, it automatically rebutes
the machine every night so that when I get to the machine in the morning, it's up,
it's fresh, the default programs are all running, everything's stabilized,
and I'm good to go. Finally, as it turns out, some of this material came from a PDF
that I offer for free if you subscribe to the Ask Leo Confident
Computing newsletter. Ten reasons your computer is
slow and what to do about it. This video, there's more than 10. But many of the things that I've talked
about here, I go into in more depth in that ebook so that you have a better
chance of understanding exactly what these things I've been talking about really
do and what you should do about them. I hope this helps you
get a faster machine. I really do. For updates, for comments, for links related to this topic,
and more, visit askleo.com/165168 I'm Leo Notenboom. This is
Askleo.com Thanks for watching.
